Reason #250: Breadth and Depth

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled Space Friday for a little news of the navel-gazing variety.

When I started this blog a year ago, I wanted to accomplish two things--one, prove that there was no shortage whatsoever of federal activity to be happy about by presenting several valid examples each week in perpetuity, and two, prove to myself that I could actually keep up with the regular schedule that would demand.

Now that I've proven both of those by and large, the time has come to think about what else I want to do here. Why I Enjoy Paying Taxes has been a great exercise in better-informing myself about the goings-on of government; it's one thing to read a news story, and quite another to understand it well enough to then explain it to someone else--let alone advocate for it. It's also been great writing practice, having reached this week a total of roughly 40 thousand words, or about the size of a long novella (or a short novel).

What I haven't quite done, in my eyes, is written up to a standard of quality that warrants more than the most casual readership. Crucial to my success in maintaining the blog this long is the fact that I've been writing it as much for myself as for any readers I might have, and that's still the case, but now that the American government has kindly held up my initial thesis and given me a year's worth of steady, reliable positivity, it's time to focus less on quantity and more on quality.

To that end, the point of all this is to say that starting next week, I'll only be publishing one new "Reason" post per week instead of five. That way I can take the time to find a topic that particularly interests me, that warrants advocacy rather than merely offering the opportunity for it, and then really digging into it and constructing a post with more breadth and depth to it.

That hasn't been unheard of here thus far, of course--Reasons #100 and 200 are pretty much the kind of thing I'm thinking here--but if dialing back the schedule a bit allows for that to be the norm rather than the exception, I think it's a fair trade.

In conclusion, join me here next Friday at 5pm EST for Reason #251, the first iteration of Why I Enjoy Paying Taxes 2.0. I have a topic raring to go already, and it'll be a doozy.